Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Daily Archives: July 13, 2016

Another skill point milestone, made somewhat more meaningless than usual by the advent of skill point injectors, which lets players buy skill points from other players, so that those with enough ISK can have as many skill points as they want.

My skill points have all been “earned” the old fashioned way, via the skill queue and the waiting game. That is less a point of pride and more an admission that I am a cheapskate, along with the fact that, with more than 80 million skill points, each skill injector is worth only 150K SP to me. If I had a brand new character I would be much more inclined to inject skill points.

At some point I imagine I will have “enough” skills, but I haven’t reached that point yet. There is still a 700 day long list of skills in my queue that I want. Also, I would never extract any of my skill points, as you never know when they might come in handy. As I mentioned yesterday, all those mining skills from way back when were useful again as we had a mining op in Pure Blind to raise ADMs.

Rock crushing in a Procurer

So here are how skill points are currently distributed on Wilhelm Arcturus. An asterisk indicates that the skill point total has changed since last post.

Spaceship Command remains at the top, both in total points and in total points gained, up by about 6 million SP. Flying ships trumps all.

There was some swapping about of skills and categories. There was one less skill in the Armor category. I am not sure where that went, but it took 768,000 skill points with it somewhere. Then, with the release of citadels in New Eden, a new section called “Structure Management” appeared, which borrowed some skills from Corporation Management, like Anchoring and Starbase Defense Management, which accounts for all my skill points in the new category.

I added nine more skills to my list since the last update, bringing me to 332 skills, up from 323. But I am not keeping up with the total number of skills, which is now at 423 (if I added them up correctly), a 25 skill boost since my 150 million skill point post back in December.

My skills, broken out by level are:

Level 1 - 3
Level 2 - 9
Level 3 - 44
Level 4 - 99
Level 5 - 177

177 skills at level V puts me 8 up from last time. There was also a general rise, as level IV and III skills went up in number, while levels I and II decreased.

Following my change over last time from tracking how long it would take to fly a titan to how long until I can fly all the subcaps as a random metric. Here is the current list of sub-caps I cannot yet fly and the time required to train in order to get into them (rounded up to the nearest convenient value value):

Expedition Frigates (Prospect, Endurance) – 10 days

Amarr Transports (Impel, Prorator) – 20 days

Gallente Transports (Occator, Viator) – 20 days

Loki strategic cruiser (subsystems trained) – 45 mins

Marauders (all factions) – 90 mins

That list got a lot shorter since the last post, standing at about 50 days now, down from about 80 days previously.

I knocked out interdictors and tech II logi frigates and the T3 destroyers and electronic attack ships and a few other, which were all a few minutes in order to get the minimum skill level required, though I trained them all well past that. The biggest skill I trained for that list was Minmatar Battleships V, a 30 day skill, which gave me the Panther Black Ops battleship. I can now fly a blops… well, all the blops… once I figure how. There is always a gap between having the skill and having the actual skills to use that skill.

A Panther Blops

However, I am not sure what I would bother with when it comes to the rest of the list. The Loki might be useful, and I could get it to level III or IV in a short enough time. Expeditions frigate might be worthwhile at some point. But do I need Gallente or Amarr transports?

Meanwhile, right now I am training up Tactical Weapons Reconfiguration V, with Minmatar Dreadnought V next on the list. If suicide dread bombs are going to be the supercap killing machine, as they were at Okagaiken, I would like to have the option to join in on that at some point, and the Minmatar dreadnought, the Naglfar, is the dread of choice.

A Naglfar displaying vertical supremacy

I can actually fly the base CapSwarm Naglfar, but those two skills will allow me to fly the upscale fit. And then I have to actually find a hull and fit it. Details.

I have also started abusing my alt account for skill goo. I decided to set him up to farm skill points. He was past 115 million, but I stripped out about 5 million points for skill injectors and now have him optimized so I can keep him stable with his skills and pull out a skill injector worth of skill goo about once a week.

The weekly cycle means I can be patient and get a better price, both for buying extractors and selling injectors. The skill goo market is still very active… I price well above the current low offer and still sell within a day… so this is now pretty much a 400 million ISK a week income stream for me. This has made me more ISK rich than I have ever been in New Eden. I am not Gevlon rich by any means, but I can afford that Naglfar and a few replacements.

So that is where 160 million skill points puts me. Given the ~7 month cycle time for me to train 10 million skill points, I should get to 170 million at some point in February of 2017.

In sudden surge, the augmented reality game Pokemon GO does seem to have gotten more press over the last few days than virtual reality has gotten over the last few months. It has gone from the gaming press (I think half the stories at Polygon this week have been about the game) to the general press to showing up on the local news. When your local news anchor is saying “Pokemon GO” a couple times an evening, it is a sign. And then there was word of a movie based on the game as well.

This has been very much a perfect storm event, with a launch that managed to combine summer, when kids are off from school, have free time, and an inclination to go outside and do something, a free app for the smart phone so many people already own, and the immense popularity of Pokemon.

Meanwhile, the biggest VR news I have seen this week is that the Occulus Rift pre-orders from the beginning of the year have all finally shipped, but that the Touch motion controllers still do not have a firm date as yet. Go team.

Of course, a phone app and VR aren’t really comparable, but it is a reminder that there hasn’t really been a killer app for VR yet that would get the average person interested in buying an expensive headset and a high end PC or console to go with it. Right now it is still a niche product for enthusiasts.